November 2, 2025
Retro bytes, spicy fights
Preserving Digital Memory at the Festival of Floppies
Internet loses it over Cambridge’s ‘Copy That Floppy’ nostalgia fest
TLDR: Cambridge Library hosted a hands-on festival to copy old floppy disks and rescue early digital memories. Comments split between cheering cultural preservation and mocking retro hipsterism, with privacy worries and pizza-sized 8-inch memes fueling a lively debate over how we save our first digital lives
Cambridge University Library threw a real‑life time machine party, turning its reading room into the “Copy That Floppy Café,” and the comments section went full soap opera. Fans cheered the mission to save family photos, lost dissertations, and early code from those bendy plastic disks, while skeptics rolled their eyes and called it “retro cosplay.” One camp praised the Future Nostalgia project as digital archaeology, arguing these fragile disks hold pieces of our shared history. The other camp asked, “Why not let the past past?” and posted memes of 8‑inch floppies as pizza platters.
Privacy became the hot potato: the article admits librarians saw personal files, and commenters demanded clear rules before anyone plugs in a mystery disk. Meanwhile, retro‑heads swooned over the Greaseweazle (a specialized controller for reading old floppies) purely for the name, calling it the “fast & the curious” of disk rescue. The Centre for Computing History showing up with vintage gear had people buzzing, from Amstrad jokes to Windows 3.1 nostalgia tears.
Strongest opinions? Preservation vs. practicality. Drama? Whether this is heroic memory‑saving or just academic playtime. Jokes? “Copy That Floppy” puns, 8‑inch pizza memes, and confessions of finding cringe poetry alongside priceless family pics. The vibe: chaotic, wholesome, and weirdly emotional
Key Points
- •The Festival of Floppies was held on October 9 at Cambridge University Library as part of the Future Nostalgia project.
- •Attendees built floppy disk imaging workstations using various drives and peripherals, including the Greaseweazle controller.
- •An upcoming Floppy Disk Guide, open for comments, outlined the imaging workflow and was distributed at the event.
- •The afternoon Copy That Floppy Café enabled the public to bring disks for imaging, recovering files from formats such as Amstrad 3-inch, DOS 5.25-inch, and early Windows 3.5-inch.
- •The Centre for Computing History contributed equipment and expertise, and the event highlighted collaboration across preservation and retro computing communities.